The Hunger
Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) is a beautiful and dangerous immortal vampire, promising specially chosen humans eternal life as her vampire lovers. As the film begins, her current vampire companion is John (David Bowie), a talented cellist she married in 18th century France. The films opens in night club in a New York to a live performance from Bauhaus (who coincidentally covered Bowie's Ziggy Stardust in their later album). In the present day, they live together in an elegant New York townhouse posing as a wealthy couple who teach classical music. Periodic killing and feeding upon human victims allows Miriam and John to possess eternal youth, or at least that is what John was led to believe. John begins aging rapidly. He realizes that Miriam knew that this would happen, and that her promises of "forever and ever" were only partially true. He WILL have eternal life, but not eternal youth and vitality. Feeling betrayed, he seeks out the help of Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who specializes in the study of premature aging disorders, hoping she will be able to help reverse his accelerating decrepitude. Sarah, assumes that John is a hypochondriac or mentally unbalanced, and ignores his pleas for help. As John leaves the clinic in a rage, Sarah is horrified to see how rapidly John is aging. She tries to help, at which point John rebuffs her. In a last attempt to regain his youth and vitality, John murders and attempts to feed upon a young female violin student of Miriam's whom she was grooming to be her next consort when she came of age, but to no avail. As John's aging advances, he begs Miriam to kill him and release him from the agony of his now decrepit body. Weeping, Miriam tells him that there is no release. After John collapses, Miriam carries him into the attic and places him in a coffin. There are stacks of other coffins and Miriam asks them all to "be good to him tonight." Miriam's former vampire lovers are doomed to suffer an eternal living death, helplessly moaning and trapped in their coffins. Meanwhile, Sarah eventually comes looking for John at his home, but only finds Miriam. It becomes clear that the two women feel a mutual attraction, and Miriam acts upon this, as she now feels alone after losing both her former lover and the young girl she was grooming. In a memorable scene during a piano adaption of The Flower Duet, Sarah says: "Are you trying to make a pass at me, Mrs. Blaylock?" Miriam softly replies: "Miriam, please." They have a sexual encounter during which, without Sarah being fully aware of it, Miriam bites her arm and a blood exchange occurs in which some of Miriam's blood enters Sarah's body. Later, Miriam attempts to initiate Sarah in the necessities of life as a vampire, but Sarah is repulsed by the thought of subsisting on human blood. Still reeling from the effects of her vampiric transformation, Sarah allows Miriam to put her to bed in a guest room. Sarah's partner, Tom (Cliff DeYoung), arrives on Miriam's doorstep, trying to locate the missing Sarah. Miriam informs him Sarah is in the upstairs bedroom. Sarah, starving and desperate, tries to resist the urge to kill Tom but, in the end, gives in to temptation. Sarah then joins Miriam by the piano and Miriam assures her that she will soon forget what she was and come to love Miriam. As the two kiss, Sarah drives Miriam's ankh-knife into her own throat, attempting to kill herself, as she forcibly holds her mouth over Miriam's mouth, forcing Miriam to ingest her blood, possibly working on a hunch regarding the 'blood borne metabolic aging disease' and 'host' relationship she was told about affecting her own blood. Miriam carries Sarah upstairs, intending to place her with her other boxed lovers. There is a rumbling and the dry mummies of Miriam's previous lovers emerge from their coffins. It is unclear why this happens, but the mummies drive Miriam over the edge of the balcony. As she rapidly ages, the mummies fall and become dust, ostensibly providing the trapped souls with release. As the film draws to a close, a real estate agent is showing the deserted townhouse to prospective buyers. The final scene is completely out of keeping with the rest of the film and was only added (in post-production) to allow for the possibility of a sequel (Tony Scott and Susan Sarandon discuss this in the commentary on the DVD — Sarandon, at least, is highly critical of this ending). Sarah is now in London, standing on the balcony of a chic apartment tower (one of the three towers of the Barbican), in the company of an attractive young man and woman. She is serenely admiring the gorgeous view as dusk falls. From a draped coffin in a storage room, Miriam repeatedly screams Sarah's name (an overlay of the audio from earlier in the film). Some commentators have explored the correlation with the earlier 19th Century work "Carmilla" by Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; however, several "gothic" films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are closer to that original source. Other commentators maintain that the sapphic overtones were inspired by the European cult movie, Vampyros Lesbos.